How does your company organize information? Richard chats with Emily Mancini about the metadata in SharePoint. Emily points out that if you're using Teams, you're using SharePoint - it's all under the hood. And that means any files are being tagged with metadata whether you do it intentionally or not. Taking control of your metadata can mean more effective searches and managing surprises with tools like M365 Copilot. Metadata can help you protect sensitive data and make existing data visible to ...
Feb 14, 2024•37 min•Ep. 919
How do you manage cloud-native applications? While at Ignite in Seattle, Richard chatted with Brendan Burns about ongoing efforts to develop tools to make building and operating cloud-native applications more manageable. Brendan discusses the challenges around building apps with Kubernetes and how next-generation tools like Radius and Dapr try to address those problems to make it easier to make the right choices. There's a powerful intersection between sysadmins and developers when making manage...
Feb 07, 2024•34 min•Ep. 918
Is there a strategy for buying software licenses? Richard talks with Mary Jo Foley about her new role at Directions on Microsoft, including her experiences around the multi-day workshops on effectively buying software licenses today. Mary Jo talks about understanding the entire landscape of software licenses your organization needs, how they are used, and how you can build a strategy to negotiate a better licensing cost for your organization. You already do much of the work for this, but bringin...
Jan 31, 2024•38 min•Ep. 917
How can artificial intelligence help sysadmins? While at Ignite in Seattle, Richard talked with Gil Pekelman of Atera about their AI for IT product. Gil talks about developing smart instrumentation for IT and extensively monitoring machines and networks to give you a broad overview of your infrastructure. Then OpenAI expanded its capabilities - allowing users to submit report requests to a large language model that can act as a copilot or an autopilot, able to resolve tickets or prepare them for...
Jan 24, 2024•33 min•Ep. 916
How is the Power Platform evolving? Richard chats with April Dunnam about the latest on the Power Platform - especially the emergence of Large Language Models like Copilot. April talks about how it's possible to use Copilots in Power Apps, Power BI, and Power Automate to help you build your automation - and how writing prompts can help you think through what you're trying to make. The conversation also digs into providing Copilots to users so that you spend less time creating UX and more time bu...
Jan 17, 2024•32 min•Ep. 915
Active Directory is still part of our lives - but can we make it more robust? Richard talks to Jerry Devore about his ongoing blog series on hardening Active Directory. Jerry talks about credential drift - decisions made in the past to turn down (or off!) security features in AD that made sense at the time but are no longer relevant. Most of these efforts only consume time - no products are involved, or the products are free. Check out the links in the show notes for Compliance tools that can he...
Jan 10, 2024•37 min•Ep. 914
Another year of doing more with less? While at Ignite in Seattle, Richard sat down with Erin Chapple to talk about her work on Azure Infrastructure and the challenges around the cloud - more instances of everything, more to manage, more to pay attention to. And yet, budgets are not increasing! Erin talks about improving utilization within the cloud and broadening monitoring to cover everything you care about on-premises or on any cloud. And then there are the new copilots. Work to set up? Perhap...
Jan 03, 2024•33 min•Ep. 913
For the last show of 2023, let’s look back at the year and speculate about 2024. Richard flies solo to talk about what he’s learned the past year and some thoughts about going forward into the next year. Economic concerns continue to play a significant role in sysadmin life – companies are holding back on spending but still expecting all the services. And new technologies like large language models look to play a significant role in our lives – if we choose to take advantage of them! Links: Larg...
Dec 27, 2023•35 min•Ep. 912
What's an Azure Arc Guest Configuration? Richard talks to Jodi Boone about the freshly renamed Machine Configuration for Azure Arc. It turns out "guest" is a problematic word - but being able to set policy around machine configurations can make your life much easier. Jodi talks about using existing policy templates, along with Desired State Configuration, to customize configurations so that they can be applied to multiple virtual machines on Azure, on-premises, and in other cloud environments. L...
Dec 20, 2023•33 min•Ep. 911
The holiday season is upon us! What do you get your favorite sysadmin? Richard brings back his friends Joey Snow & Rick Claus to discuss some of their favorite sysadmin gifts this year. From simple gadgets that flashback to the early days of tech to the newest and latest versions of favorite products, there's an incredible array of goodies here. Please share it with the folks who struggle to find the perfect present for the sysadmins in their lives! Links: Meater 2 Floppy Disk Coasters Anker 747...
Dec 13, 2023•36 min•Ep. 910
Can M365 help modernize your workplace? Richard chats with Sharon Weaver about her work helping companies migrate into M365 and how it helps provide more options to workers. Sharon talks about how the pandemic accelerated the process and the challenge of finding a new normal today. The conversation also dives into good information architecture for helping with productivity and using tools like Viva Insights to understand more about how you work - and your coworkers! Links: SharePoint Online Micr...
Dec 06, 2023•36 min•Ep. 909
We're all using zero trust - but are we using it well? Richard talks to Nicolas Blank about his work helping to develop the Zero Trust Adoption Framework. Nicolas talks about resisting the buzzword effect and avoiding looking at zero trust as a set of products because it isn't - it's really about the people and processes in your organization that keep things secure. The conversation also digs into the tabletop exercises needed to create priorities for security - not everything in your organizati...
Nov 29, 2023•40 min•Ep. 908
How do telcos use the cloud? Richard talks to Jennelle Crothers about her work with Azure Operator Nexus, a set of services and tooling for telecommunications companies. Jennelle talks about a meeting of the minds between telcos like AT&T and Microsoft - both organizations have a lot of infrastructure, but the cloud is also an architecture that can help provide more sophisticated and resilient services. It's an area of the cloud you may not have seen much of, but it will impact devices going for...
Nov 22, 2023•32 min•Ep. 907
So, what's Microsoft Entra all about? Richard chats with VPN guru Richard Hicks about his experiences with Microsoft Entra. More than just a new name for Azure Active Directory, Entra includes essential tooling to provide secure access to all sorts of services - and not only Microsoft ones! Richard talks about how Azure Conditional Access can be applied across all types of Microsoft products and with Entra Application Proxy, you can access your internal services and servers. Many of the capabili...
Nov 15, 2023•35 min•Ep. 906
How do large language models fit into your organization? Richard chats with Ulrika Hedlund about the challenges sysadmins face with large language models in their company. Ulrika talks about how employees are already using large language models like ChatGPT - potentially risking leaking company data. Tools like Bing Chat Enterprise bring the same capabilities as ChatGPT but with a focus on keeping company data secure. Once you're comfortable with Bing Chat, you can explore Microsoft 365 Copilot,...
Nov 08, 2023•40 min•Ep. 905
How does green fit into IT? Richard talks with Mike Halsey about his book The Green IT Guide. Mike starts out talking about not waiting for government regulation - there are things we can do today to reduce our organization's environmental impact. The trend is to keep PCs longer, but what happens when you need new ones? There are more organizations than ever for repurposing old PCs and other devices and recycling. The conversation also digs into right-to-repair, with replaceable batteries and up...
Nov 01, 2023•37 min•Ep. 904
How do you choose an Azure data storage solution? Richard talks to Nicole Stevens about her experiences helping companies move data into the cloud - typically in SQL Server. The obvious answer is Azure SQL, but that doesn't always make it the best solution! Nicole talks about a customer moving to Cosmos DB for the unstructured data capabilities and a lot of speed. But does the price make sense? All these factors are in play in choosing a data storage solution, and there is never one right choice...
Oct 25, 2023•36 min•Ep. 903
What can large language models do for you and your organization? Richard chats with Seth Juarez about the reality behind large language models like ChatGPT – how they are built, what they are good at, and most importantly, what they are not suitable for. Seth talks about the tremendous hype around these technologies and how to cut through the noise to focus on the value they can provide. As an IT Pro, you will be asked how to utilize large language models, so it is helpful to clearly understand ...
Oct 18, 2023•41 min•Ep. 902
Ready to inject a little chaos into your systems? Richard talks to Kelly Shortridge about her book Security Chaos Engineering. Kelly discusses the challenges of modern cybersecurity - how do you find weaknesses in your infrastructure and security systems? This leads to a discussion about challenging assumptions by exploring the workflows that exist in your infrastructure today. Exploring the workflows shows where assumptions exist, and that opens the door to testing them. There's sure to be some...
Oct 11, 2023•36 min•Ep. 901
It's episode 900! Richard brings friend Dana Epp onto the show to talk a bit about the last one hundred episodes of RunAs Radio - and a little look to the future as well. With Dana around, you know there will be lots of security conversation. Over the past hundred shows, ransomware has had quite the story arc, especially around Exchange Server and other products. The conversation then turns to more future-looking topics, including the various Microsoft Copilots being built - could these be tools...
Oct 04, 2023•40 min•Ep. 900
Your SharePoint is on-premises (at least for now), but you want to take advantage of some of those cool SharePoint Online features - is there a way? Richard talks with Sandy Ussia about her talk at the Thrive Conference in Slovenia about how on-premises SharePoint can use Power Automate and other tools to create powerful workflows. Sandy discusses the limits of the free version of Power Automate and how paying for the premium edition lets you build workflows that will more than cover the license...
Sep 27, 2023•37 min•Ep. 899
How do PowerBI and Microsoft Fabric work together? Richard talks to Mike Carlo about his experiences with Fabric so far. Mike explains how it is early days for Fabric and something you should experiment with, not roll out to production. The conversation dives into how we structure data analytics and the potential of Fabric to bring forward more of the pipeline work that analytics needs - so you can explore and get results faster. This leads to the idea of a new relationship between analysts and ...
Sep 20, 2023•41 min•Ep. 898
2023 has been a challenging year for sysadmins so far - how do we do more with less? Richard talks to Sonia Cuff about the current climate for IT in organizations and how we can still be successful. It's not all about building new things but being more efficient. Sonia talks about measuring more precisely - making sure that the expenses that IT has get assigned to revenue centers so that you're not cutting indiscriminately but associating costs with income - then those costs will more naturally ...
Sep 13, 2023•44 min•Ep. 897
How would your organization report a data breach? Richard talks to Troy Hunt about his experiences with Have I Been Pwned and some good and not-so-good breach reporting. Troy talks about the importance of planning - making decisions about how to report is hard to do when you're under stress. And who do you report to? Are there regulatory requirements? What about your customers? Most people want to know if the data they entrusted to you has been stolen. And if you did want to contact every custom...
Sep 06, 2023•38 min•Ep. 896
Are you ready for M365 Copilot? Richard talks with Karoliina Kettukari about what we can expect from M365 Copilot and how you can help your organization prepare for it. Karoliina discusses the more straightforward aspects of M365 Copilot we can expect, such as taking advantage of more of the features in the Office suite of products like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. The situation is more interesting when considering how Copilot could surface information from within your organization. Now you need...
Aug 30, 2023•33 min•Ep. 895
What is Microsoft Fabric, and why do you want some? Richard talks to Andrew Snodgrass of Directions on Microsoft about Microsoft's recently announced Fabric product. Andrew explains that Fabric is an effort to integrate the various data products, including PowerBI, DataLake, Data Factory, and Data Warehousing, under a standard banner. It is early days for Fabric, but it's a great time to take it out for a spin for those who haven't dug into Azure data analytics products. But if you have existing...
Aug 23, 2023•41 min•Ep. 894
PowerShellGet V3 is getting close to release - what should we expect? Richard chats with Sydney Smith about the key features of PSG3 - especially the support for third-party and private repositories. Sydney talks about how developing the tool in the open on GitHub has helped steer the module into a great version. While there are some breaking changes, there's also a Compat module to help bridge the gap. And now PSG3 is part of PowerShell 7.4 - so we should see some exciting news this fall! Links...
Aug 16, 2023•33 min•Ep. 893
How does Azure continue to evolve and grow? While at Build in Seattle, Richard chatted with Azure CTO Mark Russinovich about the evolution of Azure and where it is going. Mark talks about the challenges of the recent explosion in large language models like GPT3 and ChatGPT - the sheer amount of cloud computing resources necessary to generate these enormous models, much less operate them at scale. The conversation explores ongoing innovation in architecture and hardware design, including a discus...
Aug 09, 2023•38 min•Ep. 892
What are your options for upgrading to Windows 11? Richard talks to Julie Andreacola about her experiences helping organizations make the move from Windows 10 to 11. Julie talks about the power of Windows Update for Business Deployment Services to simplify the OS update while still giving the users some control - you can set a deadline for when they must update, but the user can pick a time within that deadline to let it happen. Applications don't have a problem with the OS update, since, under ...
Aug 02, 2023•35 min•Ep. 891
Integrated communication is everywhere! While at Build in Seattle, Richard talked with Bob Serr, the VP of Azure Communication Services (ACS) at Microsoft. Bob discusses how ACS provides tooling to integrate voice, text, and video into any application through Azure. This leads to a broader conversation about the power of deeper communication, especially for difficult discussions like tech support. Can adding video make it easier to diagnose a problem? And what is the role of the new large langua...
Jul 26, 2023•32 min•Ep. 890
